


Stay Warm

by JacarandaBanyan



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Blood, Blood and Violence, Established Relationship, Getting Together, Gore, Huddling for Warmth but with Violence instead of Snuggles, M/M, Sort Of, The Winter Soldier/The Asset, Tony Stark Bingo, also sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:00:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22065160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: “Oh hey, Winter, you’re up!”Warm hands skimmed along his thick leather gear, so that the difference in temperature registered only as a faint bloom of heat on his skin instead of as an explosion. Nimble fingers loosened ties that bound him to some sort of sled.“Ready to comply,” he said, because those were always the first words out of his mouth when he awakes. The compulsion to say them was weaker than normal, but still there, like toothache.“Oh,” the voice said. “So we’re back to square one again, huh?”The Winter Soldier falls in love with Tony Stark, though it's hard to say so after so long with HYDRA.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Tony Stark
Comments: 44
Kudos: 498
Collections: IronSoldier, Tony Stark Flash Bingo





	Stay Warm

**Author's Note:**

> For the Tony Stark December Flash Bingo. Prompt: 010- Icicle

The Winter Soldier knew something was wrong before he even opened his eyes. 

Normally his body seized with pain and disorientation as he was defrosted and pried out of his cryo tube to gasp too-warm laboratory air into his frozen lungs. His blood boiled with chemicals both from his panicking brain and from the needles that retracted back into the sides of the tube like cat’s claws before he even realized he’d been pricked. His skin screamed as it tried to reconcile the need to warm up with the too-quick transition from ice to climate-controlled room. 

Instead, he just felt cold. 

He opened his eyes to a sky blanketed in grey, hushed whispers in an unfamiliar voice, and the  _ shh-shh-shh _ of something sliding over new fallen snow. It sounded like the universe was looking at him and holding a finger to its lips. 

“Oh hey, Winter, you’re up!”

Warm hands skimmed along his thick leather gear, so that the difference in temperature registered only as a faint bloom of heat on his skin instead of as an explosion. Nimble fingers loosened ties that bound him to some sort of sled. 

“Ready to comply,” he said, because those were always the first words out of his mouth when he awakes. The compulsion to say them was weaker than normal, but still there, like toothache. 

“Oh,” the voice said. “So we’re back to square one again, huh?”

His neck had warmed enough to twist to the side to look at this strange new handler. Hadn’t he been warned not to awaken the Soldier outside of the controlled environment of the lab? Hadn’t he been shown pictures of what happened to the first handlers, who thought they could safely awaken him without an armed retinue backing them up?

“Okay, we’re a little short on time here, so condensed version: I got kidnapped by HYDRA, you were there, we met a couple of times, we had an epic love affair, truly Shakespearean stuff, then you forgot about it, but that’s okay because we had a second epic love affair, I broke you out, we’re currently running through the middle of nowhere, Siberia, waiting for my AI to pick up my SOS and send the armor. And possibly a jet with some Avengers on it.”

The Winter Soldier did not remember having an epic love affair, but he does not remember a lot of things. 

“Stay where you are until you’re fully defrosted, okay? I didn’t have any time to follow all the procedures, what with all the bullets and screaming and stuff, so just. Take your time.”

The Winter Soldier, as he was accustomed to doing, laid back and obeyed. 

The man’s voice tugged at something in his brain. That was enough to make him go still and compliant with fear. Very rarely did individuals stick with him after HYDRA was done frying his brain. Sometimes he remembered  _ Steve _ , whatever that was, or the man who wasn’t-quite-right, like a perfect piece of cake that had begun to grow mold. Sometimes a woman’s face flitted through his mind, or a few snatches of words whose meaning he couldn’t make his aching brain wrap around. 

All of those things hurt, and all of them were dangerous. 

The man’s huffing grew louder and more pronounced, but the makeshift sled didn’t slow down at all. When he dared to look down and examine it, he saw that it was the glass front to his cryo tube, cleanly cut from the rest of the apparatus. 

“Come on, Cap, where are you when I need you?” The man muttered. His chattering teeth nearly shattered the words into meaningless moans. Snow had begun to fall, thick and heavy enough to obscure the marks in snow from the makeshift sled. Aside the man, all was quiet and cold, like the world had been muffled. 

_ Stay where you are until you’re fully defrosted, okay? _ wasn’t the most precise order he’d ever been given, but once his heartbeat stabilized at his normal waking rate and the air felt cold in his lungs, he figured he had met the criteria given and leaped gracefully to his feet. 

The sudden change in the weight of the sled sent the strange man tumbling fancy-beard first into the thick snow. His arms windmilled out ridiculously as he fell, sending loosely-packed snow flying in all directions. 

“Jesus, Winter, warn a guy, will you? We can’t all be super soldiers. Not that I’m one hundred percent sure you’re a super soldier, but the whole “I could crush a watermelon between my ankles and then outrun a tank” thing does make a guy wonder,” The man said as he awkwardly heaved himself back to his feet. His entire front was dusted with snow, and his nose had passed rosy and was making its way towards darker, more dangerous colors. 

The Winter Soldier didn’t remember outrunning a tank, though he instinctively knew he could do it. 

The man swayed slightly in place as he spoke. His breath came in deep, irregular puffs that sent little clouds billowing from between his lips. The snow comes up nearly to his knees, and that seemed to be part of the reason he hasn’t toppled over yet. 

He wanted to reach out and do…  _ something _ for the unnamed man. Lift him out of the snow, maybe, and carry him as though he was an injured handler he needed to evacuate from the field. Put his flesh hand against his exposed cheek and feel the blood in his face trying desperately to bring heat to his extremities faster than the Siberian wind could whip it away. Ask the man his name, and compare the taste of it with the names of other men he has awoken from cryofreeze to see standing above him, ready to start the next nightmare. 

“You okay, Winter?” The man asked. The question poured out of his mouth with little wisps of steam, and his teeth chattered around the edges of the words, and suddenly there was a giant drain in the bottom of his mind and his thoughts were swirling down it so fast, his whole being was swept along. 

_ The man was rubbing his shaking hands together in a freezing cell. The Soldier turned to look at him, wondering if the man was his new mission, but his handler slapped him across the face, forcibly turning his head back to face forward.  _

The memory melted away like snow on his skin.

They continued on, leaving two sets of footprints in the snow this time. The Asset hoped Tony knew where they were going. The grey-white sky and the blindingly-white snow melded together so perfectly that it was hard even to be sure where the horizon was. The Asset had rarely been allowed outside, and even more rarely allowed outside alone. Every once in a blue moon, he’d have to track a target through the mountains or into the dessert. But the only person he had to follow was Tony, and it didn’t take any skill to track the only other spot of color in the whole white world. 

“As soon as we get back to the States, you’re going to help me ditch the other Avengers and we’re going to go get the biggest, greasiest cheeseburgers money can buy, and you’re going to pretend you don’t know I have a heart condition,” Tony rambled. The Asset glanced quickly down at his chest, noting the light glow of something hidden away under his clothes. 

_ Makes sense,  _ he thought in his least machine-like inner voice.  _ A person would need a pretty twisted heart to love the Fist of Hydra. _

_ The Asset does not get to choose it’s handlers, _ he thought at that voice. 

Though, to be fair, Tony had already made it plain that he wasn’t a handler, and the Asset could have easily overpowered him, so he sort of  _ had  _ chosen him. For a value of  _ chosen. _

“And then we’re gonna get the fireplace going at the mansion. I’ll get DUM-E to hunt down every last blanket in that godforsaken building, and while he’s doing that I’ll teach you how to make hot chocolate. We’ll snuggle up and get so warm and toasty, all  _ this  _ bullshit will be nothing more than a bad memory.” He made an expansive gesture that encompassed the entirety of the Siberian tundra.

_ “Come, Soldat. Time to get rid of those pesky memories.” _

_ A tech jumped up to help one of the nameless agents drag Tony’s unconscious body out of the room. He left a small trail of smeared blood in his wake, but it was thin and drying already. He would live. He couldn’t stop his feet from following his handler obediently towards the Chair, couldn’t find a place inside his own head to hide his memories of Tony, but he could hold on to the knowledge that Tony wasn’t dead until his brain was too fried to process information anymore.  _

_ Maybe Tony would help him again when he woke up. _

The memory slipped away so quickly he didn’t even have time to miss his step. 

His thoughts felt like one of those streams that cut through rock ledges and crashed around enormous boulders- smooth on the surface, roiling down below. Even that thought felt strange; he knew wasn’t supposed to think that abstractly. Weapons only needed words for bare-bones communication. 

Then, Tony dropped like a stone, breaking the flow of his thoughts with an enormous splash. 

His pulse was still strong when the Asset kneeled to check, though his left arm registered a strange sort of current running though his body. 

“Don’ worry, s’ just the arc reactor,” Tony slurred. “It weirded you out the first two times, too. It’s fine, I promise.”

The soldier didn’t know what an arc reactor was, so this didn’t reassure him. 

Tony’s head lolled against the soldier’s shoulder as he lifted him up out of the snow. His body felt frail and too-warm in the Asset’s arms. He racked his memory for another human touch to compare it to, and came up blank. 

He glanced at the sled, then transferred Tony’s weight to his left arm. The joins locked into place, holding his chest securely against his collarbone. His legs flopped freely without a second hand to support them, and he had to grip his torso all the firmer to counterbalance them. There was a slight pressure from some sort of hard disk where there should only have been soft fabric and flesh. That must be the arc reactor he’d mentioned. With his free hand, he grabbed the makeshift reigns Tony had been using to pull the sled and tied then around his upper thigh. Crude though it was, that sled was one of, if not  _ the _ only object in their arsenal right now. 

Maybe he could beat a couple of HYDRA agents to death with it before the Words ripped his mind into submission. 

Satisfied that the tie would hold, he set off. 

* * *

It was just shy of an hour before he found the cave. In the meantime, Tony’s shivering had grown worse, then suddenly dwindled to nearly nothing. His breath, which had initially formed little clouds, was now so weak that it could not be seen. 

The Asset saw the slight indentation in the blank landscape and ducked towards it. 

He laid Tony down inside on the snow. It was marginally warmer there, out of the wind, but there wasn’t any real warm place for miles around. Tony had mentioned something about a Captain coming, but that was the only real thread they had to work off. Tony wasn’t really dressed for the weather, and the Asset didn’t really feel the cold, but sooner or later he too would start to shut down. Either HYDRA would find them, or this Captain would. 

That thought irritated him, for some reason. He’d just met Tony (for the third time, apparently), and already he was in danger of losing him.

“Winter?” Tony murmured. 

He jumped, muscles tensing. He hadn’t realized Tony was awake. 

“Yes.”

“Where are we?” he moaned, eyes roving over the little nook of a cave. 

“You collapsed, so I carried you until I found this cave. You said that a Captain was coming- will they be able to find you in here?”

The words surprised him even as they poured off his tongue. Words weren’t supposed to come that easy. He wasn’t sure how he knew that, but he did. Grass was green, pain could not be avoided, and the Asset was too much a tool and not human enough to call up the words he wanted from his throat on command. Why would he be able to speak? His input wasn’t necessary. 

And yet, here he was, tongue flicking through the words like it was nothing. 

“Yeah, J’s tracking me, so it shouldn’t matter where we are really so long as we’re not in an underground bunker or something.”

He tried out each word of Tony’s answer in his mouth, feeling them like little ghosts on his tongue. Not a single one of them triggered the familiar bursts of blankness in his brain. 

“Did you give me back the words?” he asked. 

“What? No, I don’t think so. I’m not a psychologist. Kind of a wishy-washy profession, you know. I prefer the hard sciences.” Tony’s eyes stared up at him with the lazy, unfocused gaze of young babies, head injury victims and those who hadn’t slept for so long that their stream of consciousness was on the verge of drying up.

“Then how did I get them back?”

Maybe, if he could hold on to Tony’s answer in some deep dark corner of his brain that not even the Chair could reach, the same place he must have once stuck the name  _ Steve _ , then even after HYDRA dragged him back and turned his head into a fresh, bleeding blank, he’d be able to find his way back to them. 

“I don’t know. You were kind of hard to talk to when we started our first great love affair, you know, six months ago, but you got better. Honestly, I’m kind of shocked you don’t have some sort of aphasia after getting a look at some of the shit in that little red book. You must have some version of Steve’s serum.”

_ That name. _ It blazed through his mind like a shooting star, but without anything accompanying it. 

“You know Steve?”

“Yeah, he’s a fellow Avenger. Kind of a pain sometimes, but you gotta love the guy. Hey, while we’re stuck here, want to let me work on that arm of yours?”

The Asset glanced at his arm. He flexed, and each join rolled fluidly as an ocean wave. 

“Is its performance currently sub-optimal?” He asked. 

“Nah, it seems to work fine, but I want to check it for any nasty surprises HYDRA might have left lying around in there. Kill switches or trackers or stuff like that.”

The Asset’s chest ached. Of course there would be something like that. HYDRA always won. HYDRA would be coming for them, getting closer and closer like the inevitable march of time. 

He willingly offered his arm, prepared for pain and unpleasant ghost sensations that went hand in hand with maintenance. 

Only this was different too. Tony’s hands stroked over the metal joins like he was stroking a cat. The sensation traveled up his arm, through the nerve connection, up his spine and into his brain. He could feel the warmth and gentleness of it before he even really felt it, like an afterglow of softness surrounded the sensation. 

In that moment, the Asset fell in love with Tony Stark for the third time. 

Hot on the heals of that love came the fierce desire to protect him from HYDRA’s clutches. It was okay if the Asset got dragged back- that was inevitable. It was like a cat stalking and then killing a mouse. Sure, the mouse died painfully and in fear, but what else was going to happen? But Tony, Tony was different. 

Tony absolutely could not be recaptured by HYDRA. No matter what, he had to make sure that Tony escaped for good, or die trying to buy him that escape. 

* * *

Some time later, when Tony had finished removing the bugs and curled back up in a ball, the Soldier went still. The harsh, pure sound of the wind was off. Something was off. 

_ Voices.  _

A flash of fear crackled down his spine like stray fingers of electricity in the Chair. They were not alone anymore. 

He glanced down at Tony, who was still curled up as tight as like a frightened hedgehog. Tony was special, but not special in the same way that Soldier was. The chattering of his teeth nearly drowned out the stray voices entirely. 

Perhaps it was Tony’s friends, the mysterious ‘Cap’ and ‘Rhodey.’ Or perhaps it was HYDRA, following them through the snow, ready to drag them back to hell. 

Tony groaned, and little wisps of steam escaped his mouth. It looked like his soul was rising from his body, leaving the cold shell behind. 

The Soldier’s metal arm shifted restlessly, plates shuddering and complaining in the cold. Up near the base, the contracting metal pulled so fiercely on his shoulder that it felt like the flesh would be torn from the bone of his shoulder. Inside his chest, his heart rate began to rise like a child’s lost helium balloon, steadily and uncontrollably. He tried to claw down the sensations that rose up in his chest like seawater inside a sinking ship. He wanted desperately to escape from his body, but if he did that it would be all the easier for HYDRA to claim in all over again. 

He needed be a weapon again. 

The cave was shallow, just enough to shield from the Siberian wind. If there were any loose rocks he could throw from a distance or crack against soft, unenhanced human heads, they were buried under a layer of snow. He could throw his boots, but then his feet would begin to suffer frostbite and then heal in a constant, painful cycle, and he might be dangerously distracted. 

Hand-to-hand it was, then. He’d just have to kill them before they reached the cave so they couldn’t use Tony against him. 

Snatches of words whose faint ghosts still burned his brain like a brand flitted through his mind, and his heartbeat echoed in his ears.

He stepped carefully out of the cave, body stiff and tensed for impact from all sides. For a moment, his fear of unseen enemies was strong enough to override what his eyes were seeing, and he imagined the grey sky full of a giant looming skull instead of a sun, with long, vile tentacles stretching down to earth like dead animal’s tongues, searching for him. 

Then he spotted the STRIKE agents, and attacked. 

The first two went down without ever knowing he was there. The third managed to shout before he wrapped his metal fingers around his neck and squeezed. The fourth and fifth went down as they tried to flee. 

The final agent, as pale as a bled-out corpse, managed to flee several meters while the Asset tore through his comrades. The Asset caught his ankle in a metal fist and twisted until he felt a snap. The man howled, and the Asset wondered if he had screamed like that before HYDRA gave him his mask and mouthguard. 

Just before he could go in for the kill, however, he remembered Tony. 

Tony, the one light in his dark, confusing existence. Tony, who had somehow given him back the words that used to be reserved just for people, not for tools. Tony, who was half-dead of cold and getting colder every minute it took his friends to come rescue him. 

“Hey, what are you- oh no. Hey, Soldat,  _ freight car-” _

The Asset pounced like a fleet-winged eagle swooping down on some pitiful creature that crawled on its belly in the dirt. Five metal fingers wrapped around the man’s throat, strangling the words before they could trigger the horrible blankness. 

He dragged the man, struggling like an eel on a spear, back to the mouth of the cave. 

Tony was still there, curled up and vibrating with weak shivers. His eyes were closed. Tiny ice crystals grew from his eyelashes- his tears must have frozen his eyes shut.

“Winter? Is that you?”

“It’s me, Tony,” he answered, and the word  _ me _ only barely caught between his teeth. “I brought something to warm you up a bit.”

Tony hummed in confusion. 

“Did Cap finally get here? I thought Jarvis would alert me when he was nearby…”

The Asset reached up with his flesh hand and snapped a long, shiny blade of frozen ice off the roof of the cave. The soft crunch made the man caught in his fist redouble his struggles, but it was already much too late. 

“Not yet. But don’t worry, this will keep you warm until they get here.”

He tested the weight of the icicle as though it was a knife he’d never held before but whose weight and balance he’d have to know if he wanted to kill his target. He held it up to his mouth and broke off bits with his teeth until the edges were nothing but sharp blades and ragged edges. Then he stabbed it into the man’s throat. 

Blood gushed from the wound, hot and steaming in the Siberian air. He rushed the dying man over to where Tony lay and let the blood pour out of his destroyed throat and onto Tony’s freezing body. 

“Winter?” Tony asked. “What was that? It’s so  _ warm.” _

The Asset cast the icicle aside, half-melted by the sudden heat of the blood, and forced the hole in his throat open wider. Hot blood poured over Tony, and his shivers began to subside.

“It’s so sticky and  _ wet _ . Winter, what is it?”

“Shhh. Just rest for me, okay? Your friends will be here soon.”

As if on cue, a small voice piped up from Tony’s pocket. 

“Sir, Captain Rogers and I are within a mile of your signature. Can you respond?”

“J, I’m fine. Well, I’m not fine, but I’ll live until you get here. Get this, I fell in love. You’ll like him, J, he takes good care of me. Keeps me warm, carries me when I fall, keeps the HYDRA goons from hurting me too bad, all that good stuff. He’s coming back to New York with us.”

“Of course, Sir.”

The STRIKE agent’s struggles dwindled to nothing, but his blood continued to flow. The Asset was careful to make sure it covered as much of Tony’s body as possible. 

“See, help will be here soon. You just stay warm until they get here, okay?”

_ I love you, _ he wanted to say, but those were tricky words. Much harder than  _ stay warm.  _ He’d have to stick around Tony for a while longer before his throat was ready to surrender those words. 

But for now,  _ stay warm _ would do. 


End file.
